Sunny Lemon Tina By Steve Way

 

I spend some of my time teaching English, mainly to Spanish adults. Aware of the difficulties they face, especially if they begin learning as adults, it still amazes me that any of us learn a language particularly when we are toddlers. Inevitably we learn the meanings by context, and I wondered, as people interested in words, whether as for me this not completely reliable method hadn’t always worked as it should.

In my case the most significant word was ‘hiatus’. I don’t remember first coming across it - I don’t think it was at primary school! However and whenever it was, either through my own naivety or ambiguous context that could be misconstrued – by me at least – I mistakenly deduced that a hiatus described a raucous disturbance. It sounded to me (and still does) like an energetic slightly anarchic word. ‘There was a hiatus in the saloon until the sheriff and his deputies broke up the fighting.’ It doesn’t sound at all to me to represent a word donating a break or pause in events , the almost exact opposite of my mistaken conclusion.

Of course, my mistake could be an indication of my own unique stupidity, but I would be fascinated to know if any of you incorrectly defined a word or two until you knew better. And also if, like me, you still find it challenging to see the word as it should be but rather as you first erroneously assigned its meaning.

A not dissimilar experience occurred for me when they ‘taught’ us French at school. For a long time – or it felt like a long time to an eight-year-old – we were only taught verbally but by this age many of us were competent readers of English. I’m sure I can’t have been the only child who therefore deduced how all the words were spelled. Before long I had mentally devised a fairly extensive written vocabulary. Then one awful day the teacher wrote out one of the sentences we’d just repeated back to her. I was so shocked I nearly jumped out of my chair and shouted, ‘No! That’s wrong!’ Of course the written language I’d created bore no resemblance to reality! I still feel upset about it over fifty years later! What I’ve realised since is that if we were only to be taught verbally to begin with the lessons should have started when we were younger, before or as we were learning to spell in English. It’s somewhat I ironic that I’ve ended up living in France – and am reasonably fluent in French – as this was the first of many upsetting and off-putting experiences of learning French at school. It does seem to me that the UK education systems still don’t support the teaching of languages as they should even half a century after me and my peers’ experiences.

Talking of teaching experiences back then, and still slightly on the same theme, it seems that in England at least at that time there was a fashion to ‘teach’ eight-year-olds a handful of French songs. Presumably this was partly meant to contribute to our cultural education. I suspect this because my wife, who was brought up in Leeds, was subject to the same nonsense as me, raised in Wiltshire. A favourite was ‘Frère Jacques’, in translation ‘Brother Jack’. After (unwittingly) repeating his name in the song we then had to repeat the question ‘dormez-vous?’ (‘Are you asleep?’). Apparently this is because instead of sleeping in he should be ringing the morning bell, ‘sonnez le matines’. Finally we had to repeat the only vaguely understandable part of the song which was the sound of the bells, ‘ding dang dong’. We would then be divided into groups to sing the song as a ‘round’. Now given that Jan had the same experience as me while growing up at the other end of the country our experience can’t be unique – but the teachers never had the sense to tell us what the words meant. They were just a seemingly random choice of sounds and words that you could sing in a cacophony of meaninglessness in the form of a round. I can’t remember what I imagined ‘Frère Jacques’ to be in my mind – something like ‘Fr-airy-jack-uh’ or something of that nature. I also had some mental picture of ‘sonnez le matines’ but Jan wins first prize with ‘Sunny Lemon Tina’. Another favourite was ‘Sur le pont d’Avignon’ (On Avignon bridge) – imagine the fun we had with that one! Or not. Even at a young age I resented us having to all sit there singing apparently random gobbledegook for forty minutes at a time. I would also be interested to know if any of you endured similarly ludicrous experiences.